642 A large bang wakes me up and I glance over at my phone and I realise I forgot to set the alarm and I'm running late for work.

I rush through the toilet, bathroom and kitchen not really having time for a cup of tea and some toast but eating them anyway.

Then run out of the house into the street, except it isn't my street, it's a street which I sometimes have in my dreams which is a mix of things I must have seen on television or lived in at university.

As I get to the bus stop the bus is driving away.

It's then I realise I'm feeling a bit cold and that as is so often the case in my dreams I'm completely naked and everyone is looking at me.

I try to use my limbs to try and cover myself up and start running back towards home but it's not there any more.

I run to the next street and then the next but my house isn't there.

So I decide to run towards work, but the street gives way to a city I don't recognise.

I see another bus, but again I can't get on.

Then I hear the sound of a horse slowing down next to me and looking up see Gal Gadot smiling at me.

But it's not the actress, it's actually Wonder Woman from the film.

"I have you" she says and puts her arm out towards me smiling.

I grab her hand and she pulls me onto the back of the horse behind her and I tightly hold of her waist with both hands and we're off galloping through the streets between cars, and it's a wide boulevard like you'd find in a large city but the streets are empty.

Then there's another loud noise and the "scene" changes and I'm standing in a muddy battlefield.

I hear gunshots and I start to run forward with a shield in hand and I'm not just with Wonder Woman now, I am Wonder Woman in the scene from the film, being showered in a hail of bullets determined to get to the other side.

I can't tell if I look like her, but I feel powerful and I have her armour and boots on.

I run and run and run and eventually reach the other trench, but its not filled with Germans but the people I work with and they're all looking at me because I'm naked again and that's when my alarm woke me up.

Why The Apartment is the greatest Christmas film of all time:
"The Apartment is the perfect Christmas film. Not Christmas as we'd like it to be – roaring fires, jingle bells, snow – but Christmas as it is in reality. Sometimes joyful, sometimes mundane, sometimes lonely. The holiday season has always offered introspection: we hope for a moment of thankfulness, but life in its strange cruelty can, for some, feel like the knife is only being dug deeper, as hard as we may try to stifle the prospect."

Geeks Vs Loneliness: counting Christmas blessings:
"Cards on the table - I’m a Bah Humbug kind of person. Christmas comes but once a year for which I am thankful. This year it appears to be having a four month gestation period. The slush factor kicks in right about the time The X Factor raises its many hydra-ed head. And with it comes the ants of anxiety."

Deck the Halls with Vince Guaraldi:
"It’s that time of year. Most holiday Muzak seems to do little more than contaminate the air, but Vince Guaraldi’s contribution remains comparatively fresh. The four best tracks from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” are in steady rotation. Guaraldi’s cover of “O Tannenbaum” is simple and “jazzy”; the slightly bland “Skating” offers rolling thirds in waltz time; “Christmas Time Is Here” is an excellent song given extra character by a children’s chorus. This is all good enough music, but there’s no doubt that the headliner is one of the most famous piano pieces of all time, “Linus and Lucy.”"

We Need to Move Christmas:
"The worst thing about Christmas is that it makes winter longer, and unbearably so. Thanksgiving ends and suddenly it’s supposed to be Christmas, even though there are still orange leaves here and there, which some people—I would venture to say a lot of people—like. Fall is tolerable enough that we don’t need to run out the clock on it, and yet we do, by sticking Christmas right after Thanksgiving, when as a group, we are tired to our bones, but not of the right things, and unable to admit it. We’re tired of our families, of hearty foods, of holidays themselves. You know you’ve got a problem on your hands when you’re literally tired of love. Why not give ourselves a break and move Christmas to the end of January?"

This Looks Terrible! Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa:
"As a pop culture writer, I live for the thrill of discovery. I live to discover art, but more often, and more importantly, trash. But not just any trash. No, I live for transcendent trash. I live for garbage that gets under your skin and infects your soul. I live for the kind of exquisitely unself-conscious trash that needs to be shared with the world, if only so that readers can share my pain and confusion. "

642 "If anyone asks, I always tell them I'm a bit 'man at Asda' " Burns grins as we relax onto the park bench where we're to conduct this interview, "But I bought this t-shirt from Amazon and the jumper is from M&S."

[There's an unpleasant non-PC thread running through the book of which this is an example, redolent of the kind of xenophobic stereotyping exemplified by Sasha Baron Cohen's Borat. As a test I actually googled Kazakhstan and "sheep's eyeball" and the only results are from other websites which have used it as a writing prompt. I'm not playing this game, especially since Tom Kitchen once cooked them on television and they sounded quite tasty.]

With any luck they'll live in the same place you do, but sometimes the person you want to hug will require you to make arrangements and plans and exist outside of your front door.

Tell them you want to hug.

Sometimes you'll need the hug for some reason.

It's ok to tell them that too.

Sometimes it's for the best.

Hug.

This can be awkward depending on how often the two of you have hugged before.

Often, if this isn't your first time, you'll already have a muscle memory of where to put your various limbs and digits.

If this is your first time be ready for not being sure where everything fits.

Mistakes can be made.

Not everyone hugs in the same way.

Under arms and over arms can be a problem.

But you should settle into something eventually.

Keep hugging until both feel like you've had everything you can from the situation.

Hugging someone for longer than they're comfortable with can be awkward and benefits neither of you.

Unclench.

Important: Do not hug anyone especially strangers without consent and you're absolutely sure it's what they want too. If you're potentially making someone uncomfortable and have a hint that they're only doing it to please you, don't.

642 Into exile? The Casio Bell Alarm which has woken me up almost every morning since the day after my eighteenth birthday, a photo of my parents probably the one on my shelf at the moment which I think was taken during my 21st birthday and the complete works of Shakespeare edited by Bate and Rasmussen. Those are the three things I'd want to take with me. But if it was an emergency and I had to grab only one thing, it would be the portable hard disk attached to this PC. It has everything on it.